September 25, 2012

Right to know - part 2. Newspapers Canada audit

Spec reporter Steve Buist wrote a story Sept. 15 about access to information and he called information our sunlight. If that's the case, in Hamilton, the forecast is overcast.

Newspapers Canada released it's annual FOI audit this week (results, including an interactive map available at this link).

The audit measures response time to requests for federal, provincial and municipal information. In Hamilton, there is sunshine to spread.

"Hamilton jumped out at us and not in a good way," said Fred Vallance-Jones, who led the audit. Fred is associate professor of
journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and a former Spec reporter. He assembled a student
audit team to submit and track more than 400 access requests from
January to May 2012.

He said the city scored poorly in response time. Of the 10 requests submitted, the city averaged 48 days to respond.

"That's a long time," he says. "They are supposed to do it in 30 days."

Fred said the audit team is perplexed by the response it got from the Hamilton Police Service when requesting information about how many times its officers used tasers on people. He said police services should be able to tell the public about their use of force statistics. But not in this case, "and it was the only police force that responded that way. I don't know if it is accidental or if there is something else going on."

The Newspapers Canada reports says this about how the Hamilton Police Service responded (page 31):

"Hamilton appeared to misread the request as applying only to 2010 and said it had no records, on the basis that under its records retention policy it no longer had records for 2010."

Hamilton's portion of the audit is on page 49 of the report. See the report here

Response letters from city Hamilton about police and transit requests are posted here: